I was invited this week to take part in a ’round table’ discussion between Major Paul Moga (USAF), Professor James Arthur Mowbray (Air War College), and selected bloggers with an interest in aviation (including Scott Palmer of the Avia-Corner). I’m not sure the producers realised that I’m down under, but although the scheduled time for the chat actually was at a reasonable hour, my time, I had to decline because of a prior engagement. At least it spared everyone concerned the trouble of translating my native Strine on the fly …

The purpose was to advertise a documentary series called Showdown: Air Combat, which starts this Sunday on the Military Channel. Which I’m happy to do in this case, because the aforementioned discussion has been made freely available online. Of course I won’t be able to watch it, but it looks interesting: the basic idea being to replay, using warbirds or RC models, ten notable dogfights from the First World War on. Sadly, only one episode features a British aeroplane, that on the Red Baron’s last flight.

The discussion can be played below, or listened to here. It lasts for about 45 minutes.

At one point (about 25 minutes in), Prof. Mowbray says that the aeroplane was always viewed as one of the most expensive weapon systems, and that so when Douhet started talking about fleets of thousands of bombers, everybody laughed at him because nobody could afford that many. Of course, in a discussion like this there’s not the time to fully qualify one’s remarks, and I’d hate for anyone to take me to task for a mistake made when speaking off the cuff, but I can’t agree. Before 1914, people like Claude Grahame-White often made the argument that you could buy a thousand aeroplanes, say, for the cost of one dreadnought — and it might only take one bomb from one aeroplane to sink that dreadnought. A bargain at twice the price, if true. And at the end of the war, the great powers did have massive fleets of aircraft — the RAF had over 22000 aircraft on its books (though this number includes every category of aeroplane: reserves, trainers, obsolete models and probably scraps of broken wing sitting in the corner of the hangar). It probably would have had many more had the war continued into 1919. But don’t let my pedantry put you off having a listen!

E. H. Carr in conversation with Collin Brooks, BBC Home Service, 30 September 1940:

After 1919 we were always worrying about keeping up our naval supremacy. And, of course, we were right. But what did we do about the Air Force? Hardly anything. We just let it dwindle away. We thought air power of so little importance that there was a time early in the nineteen-thirties when there were six countries in the world with air forces bigger than ours. And as you know, we had not really made up the leeway when war began. If we had only outnumbered the Germans in the air as we did at sea, how different it all would have been! Well now, why did we care so much about our Navy and so little about our Air Force? Simply because our Navy had been tremendously important before 1914 — in fact for three centuries or more — and to keep a strong Navy was all part of getting back to normal, whereas we had no Air Force before 1914, and therefore Air Forces were abnormal and we thought them a nuisance. But I believe you can hardly overestimate the harm we have done ourselves by this habit of trying all the time to get back to an old world instead of bracing ourselves to the job of building a new and different one.¹

So, according to Carr, in the postwar period, the British never accorded airpower the same respect as they did for seapower, simply because they were too attached to tradition. So they refused to adapt to the new reality, or in other words, did not become sufficiently airminded, and paid the price for this failure. His whole talk was not actually about airpower or even warfare as such; he was using this as an example of a widespread flaw, as he saw it, in the British psyche.

The end of September 1940 might seem a strange time to be complaining about Britain’s aerial weakness. The Luftwaffe had been assaulting the country since mid-August with little success. London itself came under continuous and heavy attack from 7 September, when the Blitz began. By the point of Carr’s broadcast, many (not all, yet) commentators in the press had already concluded that that if this was the worst that Germany could do, then the storm could be weathered.

But there was still room for criticism: the subtitle of the broadcast was ‘How did we get here?’, and Carr could have been referring to the fact that Britain was the one being attacked (if it had the bigger air force, it could have been doing the attacking — though if press accounts were to be believed, it was already doing so very effectively — or at least deterred attack by Germany). Or, perhaps more likely given his reference to the relative size of the RAF at the start of the war, that it wouldn’t have come to war at all, that Germany wouldn’t have dared invade Poland or occupy Bohemia and Moravia, etc, for fear of a powerful Bomber Command.

Incidentally, in this respect Brooks was an appropriate choice as Carr’s interlocutor: he was Lord Rothermere’s righthand man throughout the 1930s, and was chosen by him to manage the National League of Airmen in 1935. As such he was involved in one of the most ambitious attempts to create an airminded Britain. (Though nothing is made of this in the discussion/interview, and anyway it’s not clear to me how interested he was in the air problem himself, rather than because Rothermere told him to be.)

But, all seriousness aside, this opens up a whole new field of historical inquiry: what did the other great historiographical writers think about airpower? Did Elton grow up fearing the shadow of the bomber? Did Braudel sign on to the international air force concept? What did Collingwood think of the Zeppelin menace? Was Ranke in favour of military ballooning? (Don’t) watch this space …

1. ”Taking stock — I. How did we get here?”, Listener, 10 October 1940, 508.

Among other things, the Fathom Archive has an online seminar on Early Contributions to Aviation. Of most interest to me is this 1960 oral history interview with Sir Thomas Sopwith (of Sopwith Camel fame, among other things): he highlights the role of the First World War in forcing aviation technology. Whoever transcribed the interview clearly didn’t know much about the history of British aviation, as there are all sorts of strange goofs in it (most obviously, “1 1/2 Strutta” instead of “1 1/2 Strutter“; the others are left as an exercise for the reader!) But that just shows the value of providing the actual source - as Fathom does here, in the form of an audio recording of the interview in RealPlayer format. (Via Early Modern Notes.)